code4lib

Whenever I go on Twitter, it seems like Michelle is at a meeting or on her way to another meeting. It’s amazing the girl gets anything done with all those meetings! So I can completely understand her intense dislike for in-person meetings. I think everyone has been to meetings where they feel like they just lost an hour or two of their life for nothing. A few weeks ago I went to what was supposed to be a quick meeting on goal-setting that turned into a 90-minute complaint session instead. We all came out of it feeling frustrated that very little had been accomplished. But I do question what Michelle said about face-to-face meetings existing to keep power in the hands of those who have it because face-to-face meetings hide what really goes on and those with the power are afraid of the transparency that would result from online meetings. I just don’t see that. At least I haven’t seen it in my own personal experience. Perhaps some people don’t want public meetings or a transcript of meetings because they’re afraid of that sort of transparency, but I doubt that’s the reason why most groups keep meetings face-to-face. I do see that a lot of people are very stuck on the idea of having face-to-face meetings for things that could be better accomplished online just because that’s the way they’ve always done it or because they just aren’t comfortable with the new collaborative technologies.

Technology has made so much possible in terms of connecting to others and collaborating online. Collaborative technologies have become more cost-effective and more sophisticated. With tools like wikis and Google Docs and Spreadsheets, we can create documents asynchronously. With instant messaging, Voice over IP and web conferencing software we can communicate with others in real time. I have planned a lot of things online with people thousands of miles away. I love to tell people how Michelle, Dorothea, Karen, Amanda, Ellyssa and I planned Five Weeks to a Social Library using instant messaging, e-mail and a wiki. We never met in person and we never talked on the phone. And yet we planned what was a very involved online course. It was a beautiful thing.

There were a few factors that led to this success:

1. We are all tech-savvy and comfortable with social tools.
2. Most of us had met each other in person prior to this and some of us were friends.
3. We were a relatively small group of people.
4. Most of us can type quickly (which is essential to taking part in an IM discussion).
5. A lot of the work we needed to do we did individually.
6. Most of our meetings required very specific concrete decisions (what to call the course, how many weeks should it be, what topics to cover, etc.).

I think all of these factors made it very easy for us to meet and collaborate online. I don’t think that it would be so easy with a different group or a different task.

There are things lost in virtual meetings. Virtual meetings start when people come into the space and end when the formal discussion ends. They are often more focused. Things are mentioned in passing at a face-to-face meeting that become important. A lot of times, the casual discussions before and after meetings are actually more important than what goes on during the meeting. At a conference I went to on innovation, one of the speakers talked about how he discovered that he missed a lot before and after the video conference he had with geographically distant colleagues. The people who were in the same place geographically would talk about things casually before and after the meeting that were actually quite critical to the collaborative process. So he came up with the idea of eating lunch through videoconferencing with the other members of the team after the meeting. Face to face meetings enable the transfer of tacit knowledge much more easily than online meetings. I’m not saying that it’s not possible in the online medium, only that it takes a lot more to transfer that sort of knowledge online than just having tools that allow us to communicate online. I think many groups could have great meetings online, but there needs to be a real effort to replicate the things we get out of meetings that aren’t easily transferred into the online medium.

One of the comments on the very excellent post Michelle mentioned brought up another key limitation of virtual meetings:

I think there’s something more going on here that goes beyond relationship building and motivation, or lack of comfort/knowledge of web 2.0 tools, and that’s about trust. It’s about looking people in the eye, seeing their body language and being able to react appropriately to all those nonverbal cues. It’s the ability to react instantly when a question or concern is raised, rather than waiting for cumbersome written messages to make their way back and forth across the ether. As humans, we’re built with a lot of communication tools that we often aren’t aware we’re using.

I think that makes it particularly difficult for people who don’t know each other to have productive online meetings. You don’t know the person well enough to react to what they’re saying online. You don’t go out on a limb because you worry about being misinterpreted. I had a professor in graduate school who was disliked by many of my classmates because they thought she was mean and unsympathetic. She had a very dry wit and that often doesn’t come off well in chat. Since they’d never met her in person, they put all these assumptions (maybe right, maybe not) on her communications. Voice over IP is certainly better for communicating online than text chat, but it’s still hard to get an accurate read on people and the tenor of what they’re saying without looking at their body language.

There are so many things that we just don’t think to mention online or that we don’t mention to the right people. We used to have public service meetings about twice a semester or, at best, once a month. And we found that a lot of important stuff wasn’t getting discussed. Maybe someone would mention an issue to one or two people, but not to the right people or not in a forum where a decision would be made. We decided to start meeting each week to bring up things from the past week that require decisions or discussions. It’s just an opportunity to touch base on the things that maybe wouldn’t be the top priorities at a monthly meeting, but that need to be decided upon or discussed nevertheless.

There are also people who just don’t do well with online meetings. Just like some people have different learning styles, other people have different collaboration/communication styles. We have to respect the fact that many people prefer interacting face-to-face, and not just because they are afraid of radical transparency. I have a colleague, a staff member who is at the bottom of the organizational ladder, who just prefers to talk to people over sending e-mails. It’s the way she works best. We all have different preferences and competencies. We need to try to find a happy medium. While we can work to get people more comfortable with web technologies, there may always be people who are uncomfortable with it. I think it will become less of a problem with time, but right now, a large number of people out there are not comfortable with online meetings.

I think face-to-face meetings will always be needed to some extent, but there is a definite art to running a meeting effectively and it’s not an art that most people (including myself) have mastered. I’ve seen meetings get out of control. I’ve seen meetings meander without specific objectives. The person running a meeting needs to be able to keep everyone on task and that often isn’t easy when everyone has their own hidden agendas or axes to grind. Librarians should all take a class on facilitating a successful meeting. I know I would be thrilled to take one.

I completely agree with Michelle that there is a lack of assessment of the utility or success of an individual meeting and that sometimes, as Karen Schneider wrote “the meeting seems to be the work product.” So often, we go into meetings without a list of specific things that need to be decided upon or objectives, and sometimes even without an agenda. We will talk about things that require a decision, but won’t decide anything. I just got my annual evaluation which listed the committees I was on, not what was accomplished in them. It’s absolutely critical that we start focusing more on outcomes than on the meetings themselves.

I sometimes get frustrated with the slow pace of change in academia. I don’t like committees that don’t have a specific charge to make specific decisions and move toward something. However, I do think that face to face meetings are important and there will always be a place for them in the world of collaboration. I certainly don’t have all the answers and these are just my musings on the topic. Fortunately, there are a lot of smart people looking at these issues and hopefully we will be able to find ways to make online meetings more palatable to those who prefer f2f and make in-person meetings more fruitful and satisfying.

On July 20, 2007, the University of Rochester released their “extensible Catalog Survey Report.” This survey was designed to help Rochester determine what systems survey respondents currently use, what programming ability and experience with open source software respondents had, and what metadata standards are in use. The survey was targeted too large and medium sized academic and public libraries. Because of the targeted nature of this survey there were only 66 respondents. When I read through the report, I didn’t see anything that completely surprised me, but it was still a good read to see what other libraries are thinking.

The report included a list of the top issues with currently used OPACs. The top three were difficulty of customization (42 instances), Inadequacy of search functions (31), and opacity of results and lack of grouping or faceting (27). While facets were only third in the voting, the responses to the other questions show that this is a vary high priority for many libraries. I was a little surprised that the Lack of Web 2.0 functionality only received 9 instances. One of the interesting things to come out was that yes, in fact, a system like SC is “likely to hold most appeal to the wide range of “average” libraries, as opposed to those special few libraries that already have the resources to tweak their existing products.” In this vein, 81% respondents believe “that they would be able to dedicate enough resources to download, install, and support XC” and 92% said that would consider implementing XC if commercial support was available while 67% would consider doing it even without support. (FWIW: With companies like LibLime, Equinox, Indexdata, and CARe Affiliates, is seems extremely likely commercial support will be available).

As I said, I didn’t find anything in the survey shocking, but it is still good to see what others are thinking about projects such as XC and it is a good read. The full text of the survey is also available for those interested in knowing what questions were asked.

Remember last week when I posted about wanting to teach a class on social software for library school students? Well, it looks like I may have gotten my wish. More details will be forthcoming, but suffice it to say, I will be crazy-busy over the next several months. I’m so excited!!! Paul Pival asked me to post about his wish that his deck would rebuild itself since my blog seems to have magical powers. Anything yet Paul?

I’m literally blown away by the faith so many people (people I admire greatly) have had in me. I know I’ve worked hard for everything I’ve gotten, but I owe a great debt of gratitude to my mentors and champions in this profession. I feel incredibly lucky even to know you all, but your belief in me is really beyond words. I only hope I can be a mentor and a champion to others as well. Having a knowledgeable and well-connected champion can make all the difference in this field.

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-07-22

Yahoo! Pipe for "This Week's Semantic Web" posts

• Open Source Semantic Desktop Is Coming - internetnews.com
• Health care eyes Web 3.0 - Government Health IT
• Podcast : Peter Morville on Ambient Findability
• Podcast : Joan Lippincott on the challenge of the Net Generation to University libraries

• GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions for Dialects of Languages) moves to Proposed Recommendation - see also GRDDL, the Takahashi Way; Bootstrapping the Semantic Web with GRDDL, microformats and RDFa; GRDDL Quick Reference (PDF)
• SemWeb on a Slide
• Tutorial on "How to publish Linked Data on the Web" released - announcement, call for feedback. See also: Over 1 billion interlinked triples...
• Linked Data & The Web Information BUS
• Open Data Licensing, An Unnatural Thought
• The Rise of the Social Operating System
• Geneology of FOL and LP - a diagram summarizing the geneology of First-order Logic (FOL), Description Logic (DL), and Logic Programming (LP)
• POWDER Update - "a lightweight system that will enable RDF triples to be applied to groups of resources, typically all those available from a given Web site...Think of it as the automated/Semantic Web version of 'Click to Verify' when you see a trustmark on a Web site."
• RIF [Rule Interchange Format] WG agrees to Basic Logic and PR dialects - "...the dialect formerly known as the "RIF Core" will be renamed the "Basic Logic Dialect" (BLD), and its sibling will be called the "Production Rule Dialect" (PRD). Work on a common RIF core dialect will re-commence once the requirements set by these two dialects are specified.". Sandro explains: "...some key elements of Horn -- like logic function terms (which are unified, not evaluated) are quite unlike what's found in production rules. functions in production rules are just evaluated functions, as in imperative programs."
• RDF. Clustered Databases, Partitioning vs Cache Fusion - "I recently read Oracle's papers about RAC, Real Application Cluster. This is relevant as we are presently working on the Virtuoso equivalent."
• Cowpaths of the Web - re. calls to drop @profile in HTML5 (yeah, one of mine, bite me)

• Snoggle - graphical, SWRL-based ontology mapper
• Pellet 1.5.0 - adds incremental reasoning, axiom tracing, and an optimized classifier, etc. - see also Making Ontology Modules Fast
• CMap Tool Ontology Editor - via new categories in COE Editor (ontolog-forum thread)
• JBoss Rules 4.0 - open source Rete engine, featuring Drools Rule Language
• Radar Networks Progress Update - also mailing list/request for beta account

• Social Events in Vienna this week with the 15th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) & 6th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB)
• W3C Workshop on RDF Access to Relational Databases, 25-26 October, Cambridge, MA, USA
• UBL International 2007, Madrid, Spain, October 1-5, 2007
• (see also previous week's listings)

• 5th International Workshop on Philosophy an Informatics (WSPI2008), Kaiserslautern, Germany, April 1-2, 2008
• Ontology Matching workshop (OM-2007), at ISWC2007+ASWC'07, November 11, 2007, Busan, Korea
• Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI-2007) : call for ontology matching systems, in cooperation with the ISWC Ontology Matching workshop
• First Industrial Results of Semantic Technologies (FIRST 2007), workshop at ISWC+ASWC Conference, November 11-15 2007, Busan, Korea

• Internships at DERI Galway - research and development of innovative infrastructures and platforms for the Semantic Web
• Master in Computational Logic, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano - openings and scholarships for Europeans

• Open Library Project - "Our goal is to build the world's greatest library, then put it up on the Internet free for all to use and edit."
• Note to Software Vendors, the World is Collaborative and Loosely Coupled
• XQuery and Data Abstraction
• Design for the web (featuring ETags)
• Language Game - links on template languages (inc. the Principle of Least Power)
• you know you want to

• Terminology Question concerning Web Architecture and Linked Data (continuing...)

Semantics isn’t just for kids anymore.

- Kurt Cagle

~

Sources include Planet RDF, Nodalities, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

These have just got to be useful in schools somehow... haven't they?

• FludProtocol - flud

A little off topic, but here is a post for the night that is in it .... We live in Clintonville, Columbus, among whose amenities are the independent Cover to Cover bookstore for children and the independent Studio 35 movie theater (picture) (where you can have beer and pizza while watching movies). Eoghan and I have just come in from the very enjoyable Harry Potter Party they jointly organized. I fear I didn't do very well in either the trivia quiz or the bingo, but Eoghan did win a prize for his costume ;-)

It’s a bad pun, but what can you expect from someone who neglects his blogs as much as I do?

I’ve been busy, somewhat, and one of my latest forays has been getting a grip on Python, an absolutely wonderful programming language. I actually enjoy writing code again, which is more than a bit scary. I was sick of the mangled scripts and workflows I came up with at MPOW to handle converting MARC data to HTML and other such nonsense. Writing Perl made me feel unclean.

After playing around with Ed Summers‘ pymarc module, I began hacking about and putting my own hooks into the code here and there. I longed for MARC8 to Unicode conversion, which is a necessary evil. Digging around, I came across Aaron Lav’s PyZ3950 module, which had its own little MARC code. After bugging Ed via #code4lib, and hassling Aaron in the process, Ed began incorporating the code and I started some testing. Just a short while later, the conversion code worked. I bugged Ed some more telling him about some changes I made, and he gave me the chance to contribute code directly.

I’m no expert, but I’m glad that I could help bring pymarc up to version 1.0 and that I’ve had a chance to begin enjoy programming again. I’m also glad to see that Catalogablog has spread the word. Download a copy and start hacking; maybe you’ll be rewarded with rediscovering the joy of code like I was.

Well, it appears to be widget day here - I am just loading up the right side of this page with all manner of badges and doohickeys. Today I added:

• the excellent new LibraryThing random books widget
• a badge for Tu Diabetes, the online diabetes social network I recently joined
• and - well, that’s it, actually. OK, maybe it’s not widget day after all.

Of course, in an RSS reader, none of this stuff appears on the right, and I’m just crazy. Go figure.

Technorati Tags: blogging, geek, web2.0

Noise reduction. Record about 10-12 seconds of room sounds, as a sample, to have them removed after the recording is done. If you are recording a live event, conference presentation, record the room before it fills up with people. The air conditioning, computer fan, outside traffic and such add nothing and can be distracting. The sound of folks shuffling papers, coughing, etc., gives it a live feel. Don't worry about those. Very long pauses can be shortened.
Sound compression. Compressing the sounds removes any clipping from segments that are recorded too loud and makes everything clearer. Do this after removing any noise.
Volume. Make sure to record at a decent volume level. Then make sure the file plays back at a good level. I've downloaded files only to find they are too soft and getting the level right brings out the hum in the car's system. I just skip to the next selection. MP3Trim will do smaller files for free. Adjust the volume last.

My dentist told me two noteworthy things yesterday: I need to floss more, and she misses the card catalog. I'll leave aside my dental hygiene, it being a bit out of the scope of this blog, to focus on the latter.

She complained that the online catalog never works for her for one simple reason: she's a horrible speller. With the card catalog, she could get to the general area and then thumb through the cards until she found what she was looking for. With an online catalog, a mistyped word gets you, "No results matched your query", or some such. Then it's off to the dictionary to figure out how to spell what you're looking for. Or the user just assumes your library doesn't have any relevant resources and goes to find the first match on Google.

There are some rather simple solutions for this that I have seen implemented. The catalog can suggest similarly spelled words when the user searches for an unknown term, much in the same way that Google or Amazon asks, "Did you mean: properly spelled word". Or the user can land in a list of indexed terms that are nearby, alphabetically. (I'll leave it to others to determine the optimal user interface for dealing with multiple misspelled words.)

The point is that our catalogs are failing our users, in this way among others. Someone would prefer, with good reason, to manually flip through printed cards rather than take advantage of the far greater search capabilities of the computer, because we haven't replicated the functionality of a stack of paper. Vendors, why don't we have these tools in place as a standard part of every catalog, of every journal database, of every digital library? It would be nice to finally offer quarter-century old technology to our users.

’tis a bit oblique without my voiceover, but gives you some idea of what I discussed at ASERL’s “Age of Discovery” conference yesterday. (For example, it doesn’t include my explanation that after Dewey and Cutter had a fallout, Dewey got the big numbers and Cutter got the small ones.)